Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Part I THE ETHICAL UNCONSCIOUS
- Part II SOCIAL BEINGS AND INNOCENTS
- Chapter 6 ‘Bound in Charity’: Middlemarch
- Chapter 7 Forgetting and disorientation in Anna Karenina
- Chapter 8 Two ideas of innocence in The white peacock
- Chapter 9 Into the ideological unknown: Women in love
- Chapter 10 Lawrence and Lady Chatterley: the teller and the tale
- Part III TOWARDS A NEW EVALUATIVE DISCOURSE
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 10 - Lawrence and Lady Chatterley: the teller and the tale
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Part I THE ETHICAL UNCONSCIOUS
- Part II SOCIAL BEINGS AND INNOCENTS
- Chapter 6 ‘Bound in Charity’: Middlemarch
- Chapter 7 Forgetting and disorientation in Anna Karenina
- Chapter 8 Two ideas of innocence in The white peacock
- Chapter 9 Into the ideological unknown: Women in love
- Chapter 10 Lawrence and Lady Chatterley: the teller and the tale
- Part III TOWARDS A NEW EVALUATIVE DISCOURSE
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Since Kate Millett's Sexual Politics Lawrence has been associated with another manifestation of ideology – the patriarchal sort that waged explicit counter-revolution against the feminism of his day. This association has so deeply affected the estimate of Lawrence prevalent today, it is important to recall the kind of reading it is based on. Millett, for instance, comments in this way on the passage in Women in Love in which the male cat cuffs the female:
Ursula draws the parallel, in case we missed it: ‘It's just like Gerald Crich with his horse – a lust for bullying – a real Wille zur Macht.’ Birkin defends such conduct and brings home the moral: ‘With the Mino it is a desire to bring his cat into pure stable equilibrium … It's the old Adam … Adam kept Eve in the indestructible paradise when he kept her single with himself, like a star in its orbit.’ And of course a star in Birkin's orbit is exactly what Ursula's position is to be; Birkin will play at the Son of God, Ursula revolving quietly at his side.
It will be plain by now that such a reading of the scene depends on some questionable assumptions: that meanings in Women in Love are simple and transparent (‘in case we missed it’); that Birkin is simply Lawrence's mouthpiece (‘brings home the moral’); that Ursula, despite her own feminist consciousness, is there simply to revolve ‘quietly at his side’.
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- Information
- Ethics, Theory and the Novel , pp. 171 - 188Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994